Leah Chase had no idea that her life was about to become inspiration for a movie when some men dropped by her restaurant in New Orleans and asked to speak with her.
"If you come to New Orleans, and you ask people, 'Where can I learn about the black community,' they always send them to me. I've been on this corner for 60-something years," Chase says about her restaurant, Dooky Chase. "All they wanted to do was talk, and they talked to me and I told them about my life.
"I had no idea they would really use it."
Chase became Tiana, the eventual princess in Disney's "The Princess and the Frog," which was released last Tuesday on DVD. "The whole little movie was wonderful," she says. "Little girls need to be uplifted, and I thought that was an uplifting thing for black girls. Little girls see it, and they say, 'I want to be like you. I want to be a cook.' They all sit there until they see all the names and when they see mine, they just clap.
"If you can make someone happy, that's the best thing you can do."
The 87-year-old cook is just as animated as her avatar, and her story, for anyone who has seen the movie, will be familiar.
"I started as a waitress, trying to save my tips, and I always wanted a restaurant," she says. "I had no way of getting them. But I was lucky enough to marry a man whose mother had a sandwich shop, where you bought little chicken and oysters and stuff like that. When I came in here, I had to make it look like the other side of town."
The other side of town was full of big restaurants with fancy clientele. She's succeeded. Dooky Chase is a tourist stop with a collection of artwork on the walls. ("I learned that art does not have to match the sofa," says Chase. "It just has to talk to you.") And behind everything is a story, or food.
Disney sells "Tiana's Cookbook: Recipes for Kids, which is inspired by the film and Chase, who has written a few books of her own. "The gumbo recipe is mine," she says. "And it's a fun little gumbo recipe. I did it where children could do it.
"That's the thing Mama Odie (an old swamp voodoo priestess) does in the movie. What she does to it, I don't do. She puts some hot stuff in it."
And there might be another book in her future, too.
"I'd better move on it pretty fast," she says and laughs. "I guess I must think I'm about to grow to be 100."
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